


Nathaniel

by Servena



Series: Anita Everleigh [3]
Category: Underworld (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Childhood Memories, Disappearing, Family, Gen, Kindred Spirits, Loss, Memories, Reading, Uncle-Niece Relationship, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-09 07:38:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20849864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Servena/pseuds/Servena
Summary: I clearly remember the day he took an interest in me.





	Nathaniel

What was he like? Oh, he was a handsome guy. Tall for the time, with black hair and dark eyes like my grandmother, he was quite imposing. But he was soft-spoken and kind, I never heard him raise his voice. He had a sharp mind, but a gentle heart. He was quite immune to criticism from his family and ignorant of social conventions, but as a child, I didn’t care about any of this. He was what you nowadays would call “cool”.

I clearly remember the day he took an interest in me. Of course we had met countless times before, we were family after all, but he never visited my family directly as his relationship with my father was quite strained. Instead I often saw him when we visited my grandparents, who lived close by, for one of those terribly long and dull family affairs.

That time, it was a summer’s day and we were having a picnic in my grandparents’ garden. The food was delicious, of course, but the conversations were terribly boring.

I wasn’t the only child, I had four siblings after all (sometimes it seems like my father was trying to make up for his brother fathering none - at least as far as we knew) and most of them were old enough to play with. Still, even then I keenly felt that I had not a lot in common with them, so little in fact that we might as well have been from different parents. While the others ran around the garden to play their games, I had taken to reading like a fish to water and had brought not one, but two books to read in case I finished the first.

My uncle spent a lot of his time travelling, but when he was in the city he was expected to attend these affairs. I think he was more bored than me, since it’s not really socially acceptable for an adult to bury his nose in the book on such occasions. Later I assumed that there must have still been a financial dependence, because pure obligation couldn’t really make my uncle do anything.

To escape the small talk for a little while, he was wandering through the garden, and he stumbled on me on my little blanket with my nose deep between the pages. “What are you reading?”

My parents disapproved of my reading, because while an educated girl should be able to read, she shouldn’t spend her time with it. I think deep within my father feared that I would become another Nathaniel, someone with their heads in a cloud, as he used to say. He was right of course.

So imagine my surprise when my uncle took an interest in my book, not in that feigned or disdainful way I was used to, but genuine interest. I latched onto him as quickly as I could, I was ten after all, and I felt like I had a lot to say about the world in general except nobody was ever listening to me.

Oh, but he listened. I managed to convey the content of my book to him in five minutes of rushed talking, and by then he had sat down cross-legged on my small blanket.

“Anita, don’t bother Uncle Nathaniel”, my mother called over with her keen sense for anything outside of her social norms.

Luckily my uncle wasn’t easily fazed. “She’s not bothering me”, he just said, and that was that.

That afternoon, he took me up to the room he still occupied in the family estate, and showed me his books. I was simply in awe, staring at the overflowing shelf and the stacks of books next to his bed. I was even more amazed when he allowed me to actually touch them, to skip through them to read the headlines and to look at the pictures. One book especially caught my eye as it was filled with fairy tales accompanied by beautiful illustrations, a book I was surprised to see in an adult’s collection.

“You like it?”

I nodded so furiously I sent my hair flying.

“You can borrow it if you want. But you’ve got to promise you’re gonna be careful with it.”

I swore on my book collection, though small in comparison, that I would.

It took me a while to learn that my uncle was a bit the black sheep of the family. Being the eldest, he should have inherited the family business, but as he had no interest (and wasn’t deemed worthy by his father), it fell to his brother instead, my father. He had no family, no wife, no children. He spent a substantial amount of his time traveling. I was never quite sure where his money was coming from, whether he had ways to come up with it or whether my grandmother indulged him. Maybe it was both. I never asked.

I think the only reason why they didn’t object too much to his interest with me was that they hoped maybe then he’d want children of his own, but that never happened. He was in the company of beautiful women occasionally, but there were also handsome men, and much later I considered that he may have been gay.

We never talked about such things. But we talked about almost everything else.

Soon I came over at least once a week to bring back the books I’d read and to borrow new ones. He never told me that I was too young for something the way my parents did, he let me take anything that piqued my interest, and if I had trouble understanding something, he’d talk it through with me. Soon there were times my grandmother didn’t even knew I was in the house until she stumbled upon us in his room surrounded by mountains of books.

She disapproved, of course. But as I’ve said it, it would have taken a lot more to change my uncle’s behavior.

When he went on his travels, I’d get postcards from France and Italy and Egypt that I collected in a small chest behind my bed, held together by a green ribbon. And when he came back, he always had a gift for me, a carved wooden case for my jewelry, a blue ceramic vase for the flowers I picked in the garden, a music box with a dancing cat on top. Most of them I’ve managed to hold on to until this day.

Today, such an interest in a young child only distantly related would raise suspicion, and maybe rightly so. But the times were different, and I can confidently say that he never behaved inappropriately towards me. I think he was just lonely, and a lot of his other friendships were short-lived and superficial.

And I? I adored him in the way only children can. Only in hindsight can I see the flaws in his character. For example, he loved to have political discussions in some obscure tavern until late in the night and he drove his opponents insane because he always wanted to have the last word. More than once people actually jumped over the table to get at him and one of his friends had to rescue him. It was a good thing he was always surrounded by people who liked him well enough.

It couldn’t have been easy for my grandparents either. My grandmother was a lovely person, but social standing mattered to her a lot, so Nathaniel’s escapades were a constant strain on her. I assume that sooner or later the situation between him and his family would have come to a head. My father I especially believe to have had quite a few things to say, which he only didn’t out of respect for his parents.

But then in the end, none of them got a chance to voice their feelings, be they positive or negative. Nathaniel disappeared on the 16th of April in 1929. At first we weren’t too worried, we just assumed he’d caught a ship spontaneously and we’d soon get a letter that would explain where he went.

But that letter never arrived.

By the time my grandmother had finally convinced my grandfather to get the police involved, his trail had long gone cold. He had last been seen in a tavern he frequented, but somewhere on the way home something must have happened. Perhaps he was drunk and fell into the Thames, it wouldn’t have been the first time an English gentleman disappeared like that. An empty casket was buried under his name on 21th of June the next year, when my grandmother had finally given up hope to find out anything that would give her peace. I can’t remember any other time in my childhood where I cried as much and with such desperation.

After that, I carried with me for quite a while the regret of never having told him what he meant to me. He made me feel understood in a time where I desperately needed it, and I’m convinced that my life would have taken a far different turn, had he not approached me on that day. But now that I’m older, I think that he knew. Maybe he just wanted to be for me what he had needed growing up, but not received.

And even though growing old has robbed me of many of my illusions, sometimes I still believe that he’s somewhere out there, reading a good book and thinking of me.


End file.
